Pancreatic Cancer, due to the growing incidence trend, is set to become the second cause of Western death in the years.
It affects about 13 thousand people every year in Italy, in the last 15 years it has recorded almost a 60% increase in cases. Unfortunately, pancreatic cancer is one of the cancers with the most severe, aggressive and in most cases lethal prognosis. This 'silent killer' was discussed at the meeting "World Pancreatic Cancer Day 2017: stories and initiatives to continue shedding light on pancreatic cancer", which was held in Rome in the presence of clinicians and patient associations.
“Pancreatic cancer has an incidence of 12 per 100 inhabitants - explains Gabriele Capurso, head of Gastroenterology at the Sant'Andrea Hospital in Rome, to AdnKronos Health.
It is one of the few cancers for which the incidence is constantly increasing compared to others, which are decreasing. Unfortunately, this incidence also corresponds to mortality in 93% of cases. It is currently the fourth leading cause of death in our country ”. Prevention, also in this case, is the best tactic to fight the disease: "A correct lifestyle is essential - underlines the gastroenterologist - One third of pancreatic cancer cases are closely associated with cigarette smoking: if magically all Italians stopped smoking today, in 15 years we would have 30% fewer deaths caused by this neoplasm.
Other risk factors are a poor diet, excess sugar, excess red meat, excess alcohol, overweight, diabetes.
"For a number of subjects, the family risk is also relevant - recalls the expert - in those families in which there are 2 or 3 cases of pancreatic tumors in the family tree - or in the case of particular genetic syndromes associated with the risk of cancer pancreas - a screening may also be done to try to make an earlier diagnosis.
A collaboration between doctors who deal with this disease and patient associations is crucial, above all to disseminate basic information and try to arrive at diagnoses as early as possible ”.
Once the diagnosis is outlined, what are the treatments available?
"For 10-15% of operable subjects, surgical treatment is used, which must always be done at 'high volume' centers of reference - reiterates Capurso - in other cases the main therapy is treatment with chemotherapy, which has taken steps in forward in recent years, so much so that the life expectancy of patients with metastatic cancer has substantially doubled thanks to the new chemotherapy regimens.
The challenge for the future will be to make these chemotherapy regimens approved for the most advanced forms usable also for all the earliest forms of the disease, so as to increase survival in all patients. This is one of the developments we have been witnessing in recent years ”.
“For the therapy of pancreatic cancer there are drugs that fortunately are already usable in clinical practice, and many others that will be tested in the near future - observes Luca Frulloni, president of Aisp - Italian association for the study of the pancreas.
This is because we know that the changes that lead to the appearance of the tumor are different, and depending on the kind of alteration we find we have drugs that can be targeted on that particular case type.
This means that many studies on effective therapeutic schemes have been published, and in the near future others will come out, although we obviously have to wait for the outcome of these clinical trials that are conducted all over the world. There are now effective treatments that make it possible to reduce the neoplastic mass and therefore to be able to subject patients to surgery afterwards.